The first wave of holidaymakers returns to the office ready for autumn and are put out that for most colleagues summer has just begun.

Mine centred on a bike accident, so I am a self-appointed authority on comparative healthcare systems. I have also acquired a renewed sense of wonder about consciousness, sight, smell, taste, sleep and human relationships, which outweighs any discomfort. In the end we are just skull and bones and the rest is luck.

We rented a villa in Provence for a week and hired bicycles to watch the Tour de France go through the next village. Down the hill we pedalled and I squeezed my brakes to slow down. The next thing, I was squinting horizontally at the road, which was splashed with blood.

My eldest son was holding my hand and asking me questions, preventing me from drifting off. My daughter-in-law was soothingly trickling mineral water over my feet (City girl). My younger son had cradled my bloody head until helped by a good Samaritan motorist to call an ambulance.

The roads were all closed for the Tour so this took about 40 minutes. I was taken to the local hospital for stitches, before being transferred again by ambulance to Marseille hospital and onto a specialist facial injuries unit. X-rays showed a broken jaw and multiple fractures to the cheek bone and eye socket. There was also a minor skull and neck fracture.

This introduced an interesting choice. I had travel and health insurance and was offered the chance to get home. What would you have done?

I asked a colleague who had suffered a more spectacular facial injury from skiing and canvassed opinion from those who lived in France and the UK. The vote was to be treated in France. I have lived my whole life assuming that British healthcare is the best in the world and suddenly found everyone in agreement that France is better.

I can only speak for centres of excellence. Marseille A&E seemed very like a UK hospital, efficient and chaotic. Max Fac — as we old hands call facial injuries — is a French speciality. The first face transplant took place in France. I calculated that Marseille had to be a good place to practise. At one end, rough old fist fights, at the other Euro-chic injuries from skiing and water sports. The surgeon looked like Thierry Henry and had a team of female doctors with him. As for the cost — Thierry shrugged — this is the European Union.

One way of approaching the world is to ask where do you feel protected falling ill? America or the Caribbean may be at your peril, financially or geographically ( I could not have flown for a month with my injuries). France feels like home. It is literally about the quality of life.

No hiding now behind the old school tie

At the risk of sounding like a Cameron cutie, my holiday reading has been Ben Macintyre’s biography of Kim Philby, A Spy Among Friends. The book is popular in America, probably because of its enduring English themes — Cambridge, class, clubs and homosexuality.

Classy traitor: Kim Philby was seen as “one of us” by MI6 despite spying for decades for the Soviet Union

Philby left a trail of clues. It is just that nobody wanted to believe that their charming chum could be a traitor. The man who recruited Philby was confident because he “knew his people”. It is social progress that we no longer know each other’s people and therefore can make up our own minds.

* Fortunately I do not receive calls of global urgency in the manner of the Prime Minister, so spent my staycation week in Cornwall, ahead of France. In the new world it is not transport but communication that links us up. Wouldn’t it be cheaper and more radical to give the UK 5G, like South Korea, instead of High Speed Rail?

A moral compass isn’t enough for a murky world

The mission of HMS Enterprise to rescue English nationals from Libya has been eclipsed by events in Gaza but it is the extinguishing of liberal interventionism. In Western political terms, the failure of Libya to embrace democratic freedom is an obstacle to Hillary Clinton’s presidential ambitions and a foreign policy disappointment for David Cameron. Heaven help the people of Libya as rival militia groups slug it out in Tripoli.

It is the same old lesson that rebuilding is the hard part. Does disorder eventually lead to stability, or is authoritarianism the only outcome?

Who would have thought the best hope for Libya might turn out to be Gaddafi’s former chief of staff? Yet if he survives, then Khalifa Haftar, the anti-Islamist general who is both trained by the Soviet Union and accused of being a CIA operative, starts to look like our son of a bitch. Meanwhile, in Syria we have stopped taking sides. The rights and wrongs of conflicts are behind us.

We become engaged, as with Israel and Gaza, only when it does not look like a fair fight, although terrorism is by definition deadly weakness.

Foreign conflicts seem to merge into an episode of The Honourable Woman. Insoluble, impenetrable, a trap for idealists and outsiders.

The British Government acts instead like a charitable institution, trucking and chucking rather than entering the fray. Meanwhile, covert foreign policy will be conducted by deals and drones.

The Prime Minister took action in Libya 2011, declaring that we would not be “the pull up the drawbridge generation”. But it is a rational response without clear causes, states or strategic outcomes. Moral imperatives are no longer enough. For now, it is the murky era.